Throughout human history we have wrestled with the great mysteries. “Who shot J.R.?” No one ever found out. “Where’s the beef?” Exactly. Where was the beef? No one knew. But arguably the greatest mystery of human existence has always been, “How do we get alcohol to taste better?” It’s fun to drink, but the taste can be all very acquired. They make vodka taste like supermodel kisses. And yet still somehow underneath you can always taste the bitterness of the alcohol. The stiffness of the drink. The more dangerous the drink the tastier it is. And now Hard Cider is having a moment. With beer sales flat, why not try something that tastes like apples? Beer tastes like beer. And makes your kisses taste like beer. But will you drink cider? WIll your kisses taste like apples? READ MORE

We came to these broad shores of New Jersey not for refuge to practice our religion or to escape persecution from a narrow-minded despot. Bloomberg could have taken it down a notch. But it wasn’t that. We were broke. And what do broke people do? Complain about being broke all the time. And then, eventually, they move. Our shift from Brooklyn to Jersey City, N.J., was not without its difficulties. But apparently it is OK to hit every cone in the Holland Tunnel, torch a Uhaul, and take a big dump in the glove compartment if you have purchased the insurance for said Uhaul. And we’ve lost friends along the way. Friends who look down their noses at us. “They moved to New Jersey. They have broken some kind of invisible, uncrossable line that only matters to the most shallow of people. It is a line in the middle of the Hudson and once you have pierced it and no longer have eye-rolling tales of weekends without the L Train you will henceforth be strangers to us who live in fancy places like Bed Stuy.” And it’s all been leading up to this day. When I could crow loudly and proudly that I have moved to a place five minutes before it got cool. And I am here now to tell you just how cool Jersey City got this week. And you will be in awe of the coolness. And we are both just breathlessly getting to that next paragraph. READ MORE

I’ve been dreading this day for quite a while. And looking forward to it. But dread, mostly dread. Today's the day my piece from the Kindle travel thing comes out. I feel good about it, I think it turned out pretty well. I had to buy and re-read Strunk and White because the Amazon copyeditor made me think I totally didn’t understand what a comma was anymore. Or a semi-colon. What are those for? I grew up in New England, and we have these "merge" signs everywhere. But nobody merges, we just keep on plowing through until all traffic everywhere is permanently snarled. Semi-colons remind me of merge signs. I was definitely asleep in drivers' ed when they taught us what merge signs were for. And I was probably sick when Mrs. Dunbar taught us about semi-colons. Or maybe we just never bothered to learn them. There were so many books that I also somehow never had to endure. To Kill a Mockingbird, for example. No one ever made me read that. I also never learned when to end a paragraph. There were like 65 pages of corrections from this Amazon copyeditor. READ MORE

When I quit drinking over 10 years ago it was with the stated goal of “making new mistakes” instead of “making the same mistake over and over.” The same mistake over and over was mostly Pabst Blue Ribbon and Bushmill’s, and now that I am over six months into my relapse I can state definitively that I have not made that mistake again. Most beers just taste gross to me. I’d like to think that my tastes have matured, but really no part of me has ever really gotten better at anything. My friend Will considers most of the current beers to be based on some kind of notion that it ought to punch you in the neck with an overwhelming taste of hops. Why are most highly-touted beers hostile to taste? I have no idea. I drink to forget. I drink to wind down. I drink so that you will also drink. I don’t drink to unlock the complicated tastes of some kind of liquid Proust. READ MORE